Sunset in Jamaica

I was eagerly looking forward to our vacation this year. Negril, Jamaica was our destination and its known to be one of the best beaches in the world thanks to the clear blue waters and fine white sand coupled with timid shallow waves. The photo opportunities were tremendous. Most of the Negril beach faces west, which also makes it a fantastic sunset spot. I was hoping to get some great shots there with the sun swimming down into the Carribean waters, sadly all the three days that we were there , we had clouds covering the final few moments of the sunset. Even then the scene was nothing less than spectacular.

Which brings me to the creation you see above. Although not perfect, (boo to you clouds) it is in a way a nice way to show a progression of the sun setting.

The idea did not come to me while I was in Negril though. Like all other vacations, this one too left us with way too many photos to work with. In fact we were so enamored with the sun set that on all the 3 evenings we took about 50 photos just devoted to the sea and the sun. While I sat through trimming through our 450+ photos at home I realised that I may be able to do a collage of the sun set photos. Initially I thought of making it for the different days we had seen the sun set. Nothing fancy, a quick collage in picasa. But it was not up to my expectations.

Then it came to me, how about take the random photos taken on one single day and show a progression. Put the photos together and ended up with this

As you can see, still no good. There were photos with different zoom levels, orientations just didnt go together.

So I decided to choose the photos only with a constant zoom and orientation. My selection was limited, I had to crop to a pre-set orientation and try again. Much better.. but still not perfect. The horizon is all messed up, the exposures are mixed.

Needs more work, except it will now require a more complicated tool. Enter Paint shop pro. Lots of layers and and cropping later, you have the final results.